Chelen Johnson
This virtual team collects all independent research presented in 2014, and done by NITARP or Spitzer alumni with (or without) students outside of a formal NITARP team.
I think that my NITARP experience is one of the best things that I have ever done in my life, both as an educator and as an individual. I have found that I really like doing research and plan to continue that in the future both with my students and as an individual.
The more I talked with astronomers and support staff at the different booths [at my first AAS], the more I began to realize that being a teacher, and an amateur astronomer, is really very different from being a professional astronomer.
[In my classroom, I will] increase my emphasis that what is written in a textbook is not the final word on a subject. Science is an ever-evolving mechanism of discovery and nothing remains fixed in perspective or proof.
